This week Emma Quilty sat down with Matthew Archer, Assistant Professor at Maastricht University to discuss his brand new NYU Press book Unsustainable: Measurement, Reporting, and the Limits of Corporate Sustainability. In this brilliant and incisive new book, Matthew Archer weaves together ethnographic fieldwork conducted among a wide array of sustainability professionals, interviews with private bankers, and apocalyptic science fiction—and features analyses of name-brand companies including Volkswagen, Unilever, and Nestlé. 

Matthew Archer is an interdisciplinary environmental social scientist interested in the intersection of technology and sustainability, especially in the context of global supply chain governance. Most recently, this has involved research on metal and mineral supply chains, with a focus on traceability and digitization, building on my previous work studying sustainability standards as a technology of governance in global agricultural supply chains, ESG integration in investment practices, and the way corporate sustainability managers think about their impacts. 

Email: m [dot] archer [at] maastrichtuniversity [dot] nl
Twitter: @matthewarcher5

Emma Quilty
Email: emma.quilty@monash.edu
Twitter: @emmaquilty_

Links and citations:

Links to Matthew Archer’s brand new book Unsustainable: Measurement, Reporting, and the Limits of Corporate Sustainability:

https://nyupress.org/9781479822027/unsustainable

https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/book/9781479822010

https://www.booktopia.com.au/unsustainable-matthew-archer/book/9781479822003.html

Marina Welker (2014) Enacting the Corporation: An American Mining Firm in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia. University of California Press: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520282315/enacting-the-corporation  

Karen Ho (2009) Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street- her main book liquidated. Duke University Press: https://www.dukeupress.edu/liquidated    

Imagining Impact in Global Supply Chains: Data-Driven Sustainability and the Production of Surveillable Space: https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/14256

Model of sustainable development: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11625-015-0304-x 

Dan Souleles’s papers:

How to Study People Who Do Not Want to be Studied: Practical Reflections on Studying Up: https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/plar.12253

How to think about people who don’t want to be studied: Further reflections on studying up: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0308275X211038045